Addressing The Trust Gap in Clinical Trial Enrollment
Why recruitment methods often break down the trust-building process that's essential for patient enrollment — and how digital content can help close the gap.
A patient's decision to enroll in a trial is a process and is dependent on the quantity and quality of communication between the patient, their physician, and the research team. However, differences in recruitment methods and site resources create variance in when, where and who patients talk to from the point of awareness to their decision making. My theory is that recruitment methods often breakdown trial communications, disrupting the trust building process, that is essential for patient enrollment, and this is why we recognize inconsistencies in recruitment and enrollment across sites.
The challenge is, while trust forward, relational communication is the most effective in supporting a patient's decision to enroll, most sites don't have the resources or population access to recruit all of their patients from within their institution, or handle all of the communication touchpoints needed prior to screening. So, sites and sponsors rely on recruitment support, employing digital marketing, community outreach and database review efforts to drive awareness and generate a lead pool of potential participants. As potential participants are funneled through, most of the initial communication touch points are fragmented and education forward that may have limited, or minimally interactive language. Low conversation results, even with high effort inputs like a dedicated central pre-screening team, boots on the ground community outreach efforts, or high spend digital advertising, may indicate that we aren't addressing the real patient barrier to enrollment early enough in the recruitment funnel, which is building trust.
The question is, how can we introduce relational, trust building communication to potential patients, even at the early stages of awareness, without increasing site burden or spending? Across nearly every industry, organizations are using authentic, educational content on social media to build credibility, answer questions, and establish trust before a customer ever reaches out. Clinical research has the same opportunity to use digital content not just to create awareness, but to help people better understand the research process and the people behind it before they ever speak with a study team.